WHAT IS NEXT FOR MARKETING?

Without a defined, value-based goal for marketing and a strategy, new technologies, structures, and processes are unlikely to deliver significant improvements in business performance.

Focused on goal and strategy, you must create value for consumers as well as value for the company.

How to create value for consumers?

In order to attract, acquire, and retain customers, a marketing team can create value for them in three areas: exchange, experience, and engagement.

Exchange value

Create exchange value by effectively matching offerings to specific customer needs. That requires analyzing when customers are looking for a particular product or service, understanding what problem they are trying to solve, and figuring out what offerings will suit them best— all in real-time. It requires sharp conversion, personalization, and prediction capabilities.

Experience value

Eliminate hassles and enhance satisfaction across the customer journey. That requires a focus on improving journey orchestration, value augmentation, and offering design through constant innovation.

Engagement value

Enhance the “meaning” of a company’s offering—how customers perceive the brand and their relationship with it. Create it by merging traditional techniques such as storytelling and public relations with dynamic content management systems that facilitate and sometimes automate the design and delivery of real-time messages.

How to create value for the company?

The marketing function can also contribute to growth by generating internal value for a company in three areas: strategic, operational, and knowledge.

Strategic value

Marketing teams ought to spot ways to expand current offerings and guide the development of new offerings and business models. To do this they need the ability to discover growth, build platforms, and leverage assets.

For example, Amazon’s advertising unit has reported revenue of $10 billion from product sponsorships, placements, the creation of brand-specific stores, and other efforts.

Operational value

Marketing’s role in strengthening a company’s operating effectiveness has never been more important.

“No technology in the world, no digital marketing, no attribution model, can overcome a lack of alignment across an organization.” 

Knowledge value

In its role representing the “voice of the customer,” the marketing function can create knowledge value through the astute use of data science. Marketers need to focus on customer-intelligence activities such as user-needs assessments and sentiment tracking.